Movies: ‘Molly’s Game’ is a sure bet

Friday

Dec 22, 2017 at 7:00 AM

By Al Alexander/For The Patriot Ledger

When you ante up the mellifluous writing of Aaron Sorkin with the unparalleled acting of Jessica Chastain, you’re bound to hit the jackpot. And with the high-stakes poker flick, “Molly’s Game,” the dynamic duo predictably deal a winning hand with their mostly true story of how burgeoning freestyle Olympics skier Molly Bloom went from negotiating moguls to entertaining them with her exclusive $10,000-to-play card parties in Manhattan and Beverly Hills.

Among her high-powered, stinking-rich clients were Tobey Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio and our own Ben Affleck. And half the fun in watching Molly’s precipitous rise and fall, is trying to guess which of the fictional characters seated around her tables are the stars’ effigies. One, Michael Cera’s “Player X,” is obviously Maguire, but the others are a little tougher to single out, although I suspect the egotistical actor “taping his Oscar to the hood of his car” is Affleck, and the extremely popular New York Yankee is Derek Jeter. But the movie ain’t naming names. Neither is Molly, who despite offers of millions of dollars from publishers and promises of no jail time from federal prosecutors, always keeps her lips sealed. She’s no rat; more a Paul Manafort than a Michael Flynn.

It’s that unbending integrity that most wtwo favorite subjects: strained father-daughter relationships, a la his screenplay for “Steve Jobs,” and unconventional courtroom drama like in “The Social Network.” If you can imagine a crafty mash up of both those “real-life” stories, you’ve got a pretty good handle on what’s in store over the next 140 riveting minutes. It’s a script with at least a dozen instantly quotable lines, most of them delivered with a lacerating tongue by Chastain.

She’s Molly, the Colorado born-and-raised skier who was on a straight-and-narrow path to the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, immediately followed by Harvard Law School. But fate, in the form of a fluky career-ending spill at the Olympic trials, intervened. So instead of making the trek from Colorado to Utah to Massachusetts, she switched gears and moved directly to L.A., the farthest you can get from snow and a pushy, overbearing father (Kevin Costner). It’s in the shadow of Hollywood that her day boss, the obnoxious Dean (Jeremy Strong), offers her a second occupation hosting his weekly high-stakes poker parties in Beverly Hills. All she need do is smile, look seductive and keep track of who’s winning and how much.

As they say in Tinsel Town, a star is born. And so is the sort of fierce, determined woman Hollywood doesn’t give enough love. And that includes Sorkin, whose previous scripts for “Moneyball,” “Charlie Wilson’s War,” “Steve Jobs” and his Oscar-winning “The Social Network,” were all biopics about men. So he’s tapping fresh fruit as both a writer and a first-time director. And it does him a world of good, because “Molly’s Game” feels like no other Sorkin picture or TV show. What hasn’t changed is his gift for rhythmic, rat-a-tat dialogue that’s smart, clever and a blast to listen to, especially when it’s being delivered by Chastain and Idris Elba, as the legal eagle Molly hires – even though she’s broke – to defend her in federal court.

Using Bloom’s same-titled memoir as his guide, Sorkin mostly stays true to the book, but strays with the time element, setting the movie after Molly’s book came out instead of before, as was the case in real life. This allows for a series of flashbacks, a la “The Social Network,” in which Molly – mostly in Chastain’s breathy voiceovers – recounts her story to her attorney – and us. It’s quite a tale, too, full of big money, Russian mobsters and powerful men making fools of themselves, including one (Chris O’Dowd) who pledges his love to Molly, a woman he argues is every man’s dream because she allows them to be as decadent as they want without reprimand.

It’s pretty funny, but it’s also timely in an age when rich, powerful men are finally getting their comeuppance from the women they callously stepped on via power plays and sexual assaults. In that respect, Sorkin has made a truly feminist movie that celebrates a beautiful, smart, ambitious woman who relies on her wits and her brains not just to outsmart her male “superiors,” but also to teach them who’s boss.

The only time the film falters is late in the game when Costner improbably pops up out of nowhere to give his soon-to-be sentenced daughter some life lessons while sitting – no less – on the same Central Park bench where the heartbroken Oliver sat mourning his beloved Jenny at the start of “Love Story.” Yet, as corny as the scene is, Sorkin still manages to move you with what proves to be a very tender father-daughter scene. It’s simple, straightforward, just like the rest of Sorkin’s direction.

He’s clearly taken his cues from watching a master like David Fincher direct his “Social Network,” which “Molly” most resembles. It even has a killer opening on par with the former’s pre-title sequence between Jesse Eisenberg and Rooney Mara. This time it’s a rapid-fire overview of Molly’s ill-fated skiing career, which included a curved spine corrected with “the spare parts of an erector set.”

That’s just one of the great lines Sorkin feeds Chastain. And there are many more like it. And so not to let Elba feel left out, he’s presented with one monster scene in an FBI interrogation office that just might be the best bit in the movie, unless you count the moment when a subplot about the attorney’s precocious daughter, Stella (Whitney Peak), reading Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” comes deliciously full circle when Molly, like John Proctor, declares the thing that means more to her than money and fame is her good name. And she’ll do anything to keep it. It’s a scene where Chastain is all in, slyly playing her ace and taking the pot, and in so doing, rendering this a rare “Game” where everybody wins.